Printing XML: Why CSS Is Better than XSL

An anonymous contributor writes "XML.com just published an article titled Printing XML: Why CSS Is Better than XSL written by Michael Day and Håkon Wium Lie. The article was written in response to Norm Walsh's claim that CSS will never fix [printing]. Did you hear me? CSS will never fix it!. The article shows how a 100-line CSS style sheet gives you the same formatted version of W3C's Webarch as the 1000-line XSL style sheet by using Prince."

Comments

Tru Dat

[Foofoobar]

I agree. CSS is definitely better... but when you have to rely upon IE to update itself to the latest standard (much less a standard that is 5 years old) it becomes a bit tedious.

Frankly, I think the W3C should act like supreme overlord and take a bullwhip to all browser developers who can't stay up to standard.

I can just see Bill Gates bent over and bare assed in a W3C hazing ritual saying 'Thank you sir! May I have another?'

Re:Tru Dat

[dubious9]

I agree. CSS is definitely better...

For some things. XSL is much more widely scoped, (from the article), "Turing-complete language which, in principle, can be used for all programming tasks and is particularly suited for document transformations."

In the case of document presentation CSS is indeed a challenger, but mostly if the document is static. XSL has loops, branching, conditionals, and templates (akin to functions). If you have a report with some complex logic, ie. if this number is below a threshold, print this warning, otherwise show this table. Of course you could always do all transformations and logic before the final rendering step, but in a lot of cases it's easier to do it purely XSL. Yes, you could always bring Java-script or some other html-based functionality, but that's more than just CSS.

Furthermore, there was probably a number a transformations you've already done to get the data that you need. A more suiting comparision would be with XSL:FO and CSS, but again, they both have their place. Furthermore you can imbed graphics with SVG and tools like FOP will automatically render them. To say that CSS is definitely better is naive.

As in most other times when people compare languages, each has it strengths, and straight up conclusions (CSS is better!) is most often an apples to oranges comparison.

Great example of hard-coding reducing size.

[SuperKendall]

If you check them out, at least one savings in the CSS is that it hard-codes the page size for a single size.

If you look at the XSL, it selects different text sizes for different page sizes.

Thus I would have to say - have they tried printing both examples using different page sizes? Because I am pretty sure the CSS version will be a postage stamp in the middle of an A0 page.

Also from quick examination it looked like the XSL is more flexible in other ways, you can pass in all sorts of parameteres like margins.

Basically - sure the XSL is longer, but also more flexible in terms of use. Since you are only going to write it once (that is unless you want multiple page sizes in which case you are going to have many CSS files) what does it matter if there is a little code-size increase?

Furthermore the XSL could itself be transformed in various interesting ways for special modifications, a task harder to do with CSS. And you could include things like the paper-size->font-size mapping in seperate files to keep the size down and the file more readable (though I find the XSL perfectly readable - after having used XSL for a while, admittedly!).

Main Difference

[rjstanford]

From TFA:

More recently, a W3C Candidate Recommendation (called CSS3 Paged Media Module) added functionality to describe headers, footers, and more...

The big difference is that XSL provides the tools to perform this transformation - from XHTML to a printable layout - without needing to change the standard itself. The same goes for the argument made about page sizes, which are built into the latest CSS and which have to be handled manually with XSL.

Now, once you have wide support for the latest CSS (and who knows how long that will take), I would wholeheartedly agree that it would be a better choice for printing as shown here. The fact of the matter seems to be that they're comparing what you can do today, with a little work, using XSL transforms, to what you may be able to do tomorrow with a proposed dedicated language. I'd be pretty surprised if the latter couldn't do what its designed to do better than a general purpose language.

At least, that's the way I see it. So, there's some good stuff coming down the pipe with CSS. That's worth knowing about. But until it has wide support, there's XSLT. And that's worth knowing about as well, and a damn sight more useful - for now.

XML/XHTML as a layout language?

[gowen]

As the old saying goes ... those who do not understand TeX are doomed to continually re-invent it ... badly.

Re:XML/XHTML as a layout language?

[mithras the prophet]

I write my papers in TeX, mainly because it's so easy to create equations. In general though, as a layout language to produce documents that look just how I want, it's a fucking nightmare.

The authors aren't talking about using browser-CSS

[watanabe]

There's already a lot of discussion here about how IE's XSL transforms (and CSS support in printing) both suck, and how a proper workflow for XSL involves a server-side transform.

The authors of their CSS Rocks article are imagining that you're going to use software like Prince, (software that one of them created) to apply CSS3 rules to XML and get PDFs out of them.

Another way to say this is that they're not talking about how to fix the browser -> print workflow in this article (although one of the authors works for Opera, so I imagine he's thinking about it). They're talking about easy ways to transform XML to PDFs, and discussing why you might use CSS to do such a thing.

This courteous and friendly rationalizing of the slashdot editor's inflammatory post has been brought to you by my company, which is paying me for the time I use to write this. The opinions, of course, are mine only.

XSLT is for transformation

[Pascal Sartoretti]

As an XSLT developer, I agree that CSS is simpler and more readable. However: the "T" in XSLT stands for "transformation". It means that you can do things like generating a table of contents, a table of figures, etc. which would not be possible with just CSS.

The bottom line (at least for me): if you can do it with CSS, do it with CSS. But there are some cases where you will need XSLT.

Incorrect comparison

[Carewolf]

He is not only using a lot of CSS3 in his examples, but he is using things that does not even look to become parts of CSS3. For instance the content:target-counter was in a working draft of the css3 paged module, but have been withdrawn from the latest version.